Soil depth exerts stronger impact on bacterial community than elevation in subtropical forests of Huangshan Mountain.

The elevational distribution of bacterial communities in the surface soil of natural mountain forests has been widely studied. However, it remains unknown if microbial communities in surface and sub-surface soils exhibit a similar distribution pattern with elevation. To do so, Illumina HiSeq sequencing was applied to study the alterations in soil bacterial communities of different soil layers, along an altitudinal gradient from 500 to 1100 m on Huangshan Mountain in Anhui Province, China. Our results revealed a significant higher diversity of the bacterial communities in surface soil layers than in subsurface layers. Adonis analysis showed that soil layer had a greater influence on the composition of the bacterial communities than the elevation. The distance-based multivariate linear model suggested that soil labile organic carbon and elevation were the main element influencing the bacterial community composition in surface and subsurface soils, respectively. A remarkable difference appeared between the co-occurrence network structures of bacterial communities in different soil layers. Compared with the subsurface soil, surface soil had more edges, average degree, and much higher clustering coefficient. The two-way ANOVA results highlighted the significant impact of soil layers on the topological properties of the network compared with that of elevation. The keystone species belonged to Rhodospirillaceae in the surface soil, while the OTUs belonged to Actinomycetales in the subsurface soil. Collectively, our results demonstrate that the effects of soil depth on soil bacterial community composition and network properties of subtropical forest in Huangshan Mountain were significantly higher than those of elevation, with different keystone species in different soil layers. These findings can be served as an important basis for better understanding the microbial functions influencing the maintenance of habitat heterogeneity, biodiversity, and ecosystem services in forests ecosystems.